Nvidia reveals G-Assist, its new AI-based gaming assistant

Everyone knows by now that Nvidia is knee-deep in the active development and leveraging of AI technologies wherever and however possible, but it’s been unclear what the company’s next major gaming step might be. Now, however, it seems that Nvidia Project G-Assist is its next push onwards.

For what it’s worth, Project G-Assist does seem like something that could be incredibly powerful in relatively short order. Notably, G-Assist is an on-board RTX machine learning algorithm that tries to provide contextual assistance while you’re actively gaming. “Project G-Assist aims to put game and system knowledge at players’ fingertips. Simply ask a question about your game or system performance, and the AI assistant provides context-aware answers,” says Nvidia’s own official G-Assist blog post.

Examples of G-Assist being useful include sourcing live information on how to progress in games, but also in real-time settings and PC hardware tuning, which is particularly interesting. Interesting and troubling in equal measure, as it were.

Nvidia’s Project G-Assist will try to make PC gaming much easier and more streamlined

Project G-Assist is, from the looks of it, accessible at all times and can be activated either by pressing the assigned hotkey or by using a wake phrase. Immediately upon being called up, G-Assist can be tasked with a variety of jobs, from sourcing answers to gameplay questions to explaining lore in games you’re playing.

If you, too, are wondering where this information would be coming from, that’s simple: from the Internet, of course! Is it going to be wrong? Possibly! Other AI models in the past have been caught skimming the Internet for other people’s work with varying degrees of accuracy.

To demonstrate G-Assist, Nvidia used Ark: Survival Ascended, and the AI helper provides concise, actionable answers to the user’s questions in the curated demo. G-Assist is apparently context-aware, and can respond to queries based on what you’re seeing and doing in the game itself: “Because the assistant is context aware, it can personalize its recommendations to the user’s playthrough: it can analyze skill points, the crafting menu and currently locked engrams, for example, and suggest what to pick next to help players conquer higher-level areas and foes,” Nvidia claims.

Further, the assistant appears to be capable of applying Nvidia’s optimized game settings on the fly, going so far as to track performance statistics to assess whether there’s anything you could be doing to improve your gameplay experience further still.

“It can intelligently find ways to increase performance per watt, such as dynamically undervolting the GPU while respecting a frame rate target. For laptop users, power usage is of particular importance, determining how long they can play before their battery is depleted,” says Nvidia.

We don’t know yet how, exactly, Nvidia might be aiming to release Project G-Assist to the masses, but given the demo, it doesn’t seem that we’ll need to wait all that long to see how it works in practice.